Stop, Time
by bemada
Summary: Three years after Naru has left Japan, Mai is given the chance to go back in time and save Gene from death. Time travel. Eventual NaruMai. AU.
1. chapter one

warnings: **slight mention of attempted rape, and suicidal thoughts and suicide at the end of the chapter. additional notes at the end.**

* * *

The rain was pretty, in that cold, melancholic way where it froze your bones and dripped into your eyes like tears that you were trying to hold back.

Mai had always cherished it. When she was younger, she'd lived in a sunny, fishing village where it hadn't rained all that often. When it did, Mai and her father played in it, soaking their clothes to their wet skin with shouts and trills of happiness.

Rainy weather was her favorite weather. She had good memories of it and it was nice to reminisce.

But today, she wasn't remembering the good memories. Today, she was staring up at the sky and pleading with whoever was listening to take her pain away already. Today, she was hoping for someone to grant her mercy.

Today, she was hoping someone would kill her.

She hadn't always wanted to die. She used to want to live life to the fullest.

When she was sixteen, she dreamed of being a professional ghost hunter. She never said so aloud- Masako would laugh, Bou-san would tell her she needs a lot more experience, Ayako would make a cutting joke about how she wouldn't last long in the field, and blah, blah, blah.

They wouldn't have believed in her. And it wasn't their fault. Mai knew it would happen if she brought it up, so she didn't. And Mai knew she had little experience and would probably be killed by some evil spirit on whatever first case she took on. And they would have known that as well.

But maybe she was being overdramatic. Maybe they would believe in her.

But maybe, she thought, wasn't absolute.

Things had happened to her- horrible, horrible things in the two years she'd been like this- alone, living with three other girls in a tiny apartment while they all worked their asses off to pay the rent and Furihiko's college tuition.

But the horror she has seen is not who she is. She is not the scared little girl that Hana found shaking and crying in an alleyway next to a bloody body with a knife lying next to her crimson, bruised leg. She is not her physical therapy sessions. She is not the feeling of a knife being plunged into her thigh. She is not the blindness in her right eye.

She is not what she has survived.

And while she is not her tragedies all mixed and mashed into one slightly-disabled girl, she is still broken. Dead, in the sense that her body is alive but her soul feels smoked out, like it floated up into the stars when the doctors said she would never see out of her right eye again, and when she realized that not all friendships last.

Taniyama Mai wanted to die, even though she felt like she already was. What she had survived was useless to mention if her bones felt hollow and carved out, like the marrow had been replaced with lead, like she was barely getting by everyday because her feet felt too heavy to lift.

Sometimes, Mai thinks back on herself three years ago.

How naive, she thinks. I'd give anything to go back to then.

Mai hadn't bought her favorite candy since the month after Bou-san left for America.

She heard he went viral and became famous over the studio version of a song he'd always loved to sing. She's happy for him still, was happy when he called her with the news, but wishes they talked more. One call every month or so wasn't great, but if it was all she could get, she'd manage. Even if the calls started to become two, three, four months in between with only an hour of talking before they had to hang up.

She ate the taffy on the day he left. The next time she ate it, it tasted bitter despite its sweet flavor.

She never bought it again.

There was a sort of butterfly effect leading up to Mai's inevitable suicide.

She always thought suicide wasn't the answer. It was a permanent solution to a temporary problem. That was what she believed whole-heartedly.

But she'd been having this "temporary" problem for two years now, and god, she was tired.

She lost Naru to England. John had to go back to Australia. Ayako was just- busy, and was forced to move across Japan for work as a nurse. Bou-san made it big with his band, leaving Japan behind with love that could have prospered if not for his and Ayako's stubbornness. Masako just point-blank didn't call Mai. They got into a nasty fight before Naru left and they'd never talked again.

She didn't even have Keiko or Michiru's numbers anymore.

Naru left Japan and never looked back. He carried Eugene's ashes and boarded a plane without even a last goodbye to Mai.

Without her surrogate family. . . Life was incomplete.

Sure, she had Furihiko, Maya, and Fahra, but it wasn't the same. They all roomed together out of convenience and became close in the forced way. But Mai, no matter how hard she tried, couldn't establish the same bond with them that she used to have with Michiru, or Ayako, or Bou-san. She liked them, and helped pay Furihiko's tuition with the little earnings she made at her lame job at a bookstore, but she still didn't feel extremely attached to them.

And god, it sucked. It sucked so bad. She missed the feeling of happiness and love, and loving someone. She'd deal with heartbreak if it meant Naru and Lin would come back, and Naru would be his usual asshole self and ignore her feelings if she could just feel love again.

If she could just pretend to be human again.

There wasn't anything climatic about her suicide. It was a week after asking whoever was above to end it for her. Nothing happened, so she took her life into her own hands. One minute she was standing at the top of a bridge, staring down into the roaring waves of the ocean below. The rain pelted her skin and she heard a voice from her right. She turned her head and stared at the police officer with her good eye, saw him try and convince her to climb back towards the safer part of the bridge, away from the edge.

And then she threw herself down. The rain was like tiny needles poking her skin, and the wind roared in her ears.

She felt free, for the first time in a while.

And then she felt nothing.

* * *

 **A/N: before I get any comments, let me make this clear: Mai is intentionally OOC. she will not be this way in future chapters. also, hasn't been proofread, so. sorry for any big mistakes.**

 **who knows if anyone will actually read this though lol. if you do then you can tell me your thoughts in a generic comment if you want. doesn't have to be too great a comment, i'm not picky.**


	2. chapter two

People say that life after death is either heaven or hell, resurrection or reincarnation, void or purgatorial life. Whatever people believed in.

The truth was, life after death was nothing.

(It was nothing, like the way you know the air is in the atmosphere but you can't _see_ it. Like the way the Earth rotates on its axis but you can't _feel_ it. Like the way you know there are other planets in the universe but you can't _see_ them.)

It was there, and you knew it was, but it wasn't visible.

That was how Mai felt. She wasn't very religious before she died. She didn't religiously follow a bible (ha!), nor did she set times for praying. She didn't have a defined belief system, like John and Ayako and Bou-san. Her set of beliefs were a mix of what _she_ believed.

She was not a saint before she died. But she was not a sinner.

She was simply Mai Taniyama.

And then, she was nothing.

* * *

Mai was dead, so she knew that what was before her eyes had to be some sort of sick and twisted final goodbye from Earth.

She shouldn't have been there. She shouldn't have been standing, mist-like, on the side of the road where she knew was the place Gene was murdered. She wasn't sure how she knew, but it was like her dreams, when she knew things and followed a role inside of them.

And she shouldn't have been hearing a heartbeat monitor pulsing in her ears.

This shouldn't have been happening to her.

Mai was _dead_ , for Gods' sakes! She shouldn't have to- to watch someone's _murder_ and then listen to her heartbeat flatline before finally _dying_.

Death was supposed to be a reprieve from her problems. And it was.

But now, it's not.

As Mai stood there, staring blankly at the spot where Gene seemed frozen- like a glitching video, his pixels disappearing for a few then reappearing. A foot taking a step onto the road but then, like a tape being rewound, him being right back on the sidewalk- she felt something tugging at her.

It felt like someone pulling the back of her shirt collar, dragging her away. Like Naru did when she tried touching his fancy English books, or when she tried to go through his diary ( _Journal_ , he'd hiss at her).

Except- she felt it on her soul. Harsh, pulling and yanking, like it was trying to raise her up. To pull her out of a well and tether her to Earth. Like. . .

And suddenly, she knew what to do.

The heartbeat flat-lined in her head, and she knew why she was standing there.

* * *

And she became physical- _alive_ \- once again. But her old body- it was dead.

She was dead, the nineteen, almost twenty year old Taniyama Mai with a useless right eye and a limp in her leg when she walked too much.

She was Taniyama Mai, and through some god- some religion, _something_ , she was given the chance to live again.

If she had turned away from Gene, she knew she would wake up in her body, because the heartbeat was too loud, too normal, for her to just- die. It was this or that, Gene or Pain.

She would be crippled- for life, if she was being honest- because no one survives jumping off a bridge with no lasting injuries.

But- she had the chance to, and Mai didn't turn away from Gene. Didn't do a 180 and walk away from the road he was standing on, away from the crime and the opposite direction of the red car she knew would be speeding down the road a few seconds later. She didn't think about how she could go back and have another chance at life with Fahra, Furihiko, and Maya. Or with that boy who worked at the cafe across the street who kept sending her flowers and trying to get Mai to give in and go on a date with him.

The thought didn't cross her mind that she could go back to her old life and reconnect with her old friends- _family-_ and try to do better. For herself, for the world, for the members of the disbanded SPR that deserved more than what was probably going to be a plastic card sent to them telling them she'd died.

All she thought of was Gene. And Naru.

She might have been being too selfless. The fact of the matter was that she wasn't dying, either way. And she. . . Would rather suffer in Hell, than go back to living in a dingy apartment with a snobby med school student, a drug addict, and a bipolar girl who refused to take her medicine so she could keep a job for more than one month.

Mai's life wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Having roommates is fun the first few weeks. Less rent pay, more money for you.

But slowly, she began to hate it.

And then the accident happened.

And life didn't seem worth living then.

So really, was she actually being selfless? Going back to the living to save Gene from death? To keep Naru from losing his brother? To keep the Davis family together?

She didn't know. She didn't think she was being entirely selfless, though. Because if- if she was going back in time, to the time of Gene's death, three weeks before Naru's arrival in Japan, and four weeks before she started to work at the SPR, then.

Then she could change the outcome of her life, too.

She would change things, for herself and Gene and Naru, because above all, those two deserved a chance at happiness the most.

* * *

Mai woke up in her old bed at her teacher's house. The sun was shining through the florescent white curtains like it always did, right around seven AM, and she could faintly hear the sound of an egg being cracked open, with the sizzling hiss that came right after.

She heard the woodpecker that always stayed at the tree close to her window outside, letting out his average tapping noise. The smell of honey wafted through her mildly opened window, mixing with the grass' scent.

Faintly, she registered that her leg didn't have that hollowed, painful bouncing back and forth feeling to the inside of it anymore.

But she noticed that her right eye wasn't. . . Exactly as good as it was when she was sixteen and living with her teacher.

She could see, but everything from it was blurry blobs, unfocused like teardrops dripping onto a thin paper and spreading the ink and colors around.

"Mai, honey, are you up? Breakfast is ready," Her teacher called from behind the white door and in the kitchen.

For a minute, Mai was still as her heart beat as fast as a bullet train. But then, disappointment crushed her like cement blocks falling down onto her shoulders, painful and bone-breaking and entirely like her hopes plummeting into her stomach.

 _She couldn't even read the name off a poster on the wall from that eye._

And then, she was crying.

 _She came back to save Gene and her sight wasn't even restored all the way._

* * *

 **A/N: first few chapters are short because I haven't gotten to the Part With Gene, lol. also, mai seems kind of selfish in the last line but give her a break she's stressed okay. also. someone message me about ghost hunt i'm desperate to talk to someone about my headcanons. please my children are starvinggg,f**

 **PS IF I ACCIDENTALLY USE MEI INSTEAD OF MAI its because I'm used to typing mei bc that's my friend's name**

 **omg also thank u all so much for all the feedback I got on this! I didn't expect much since it's a dead fandom and pretty small but! I'm very happy thank u all**

 **also I reuploaded this bc it said it was published and updated on the 27th but that's the first time I published it? I uploaded the second chapter today (may 4th)? anyways goodbye**


	3. chapter three

After Mai ate breakfast and met up with Keiko (who she hugged for longer than necessary), she hit a metaphorical bump in the road:

What was she learning in school?

It had been almost four years or so since she'd done her first year school work, and even then, most times she received a less-than-stellar grade on it. A C- was her average, with a few D+ s thrown in.

Naru was. . . Well. . . _Right_ , when he said she wasn't academically smart. But in her defense, before working for him, she was constantly balancing odd jobs at the local market, or within rich neighborhoods, cleaning their houses or yards, that sort of thing. Most times the tasks would take hours, which resulted in not enough time to do her homework or study, and. . .

Ignoring schoolwork had relieved her of stress, too. As stupid to say as it was to do. She wasn't even thinking about college, or how she would survive when she was older without a scholarship or at least grades good enough to accept her into more than a minimum wage job.

Even though she had been an orphan- had lost her parents to car crashes at separate times, then lived in an orphanage for a month- she was still. . . Privileged in a way. She always had food, and shelter. She still went to school, and messed around telling ghost stories instead of studying to get a scholarship for college. As a naive sixteen year old, Mai wasn't concerned about grades or college, merely about having fun while getting over her parents' deaths and finding a cute boyfriend.

But now, she was prepared. She knew that if she was going to save Gene, which would keep Naru from coming to Japan, then she wouldn't get a job at SPR and she would be limited to working in a cafe or fast food joint with the grades she has at this point in her life.

Being an orphan was tricky for Mai the first time, especially since she thought it okay not to try her absolute hardest on school-work, and it would be just as tricky now because she forgot everything she was learning her first year of high school besides their reading of the translated Romeo and Juliet play.

As Mai walked, thinking about her current school situation, she ignored the tickle in the back of her mind that said something bad was going to happen today. It was about a week before the approximate date given by the forensic analysts and Naru that Gene would be pancaked on the pavement and then pruned freshly in lake water for a year, so Mai, in a whirl of stress and thoughts centered around her predicament, ignored it. She had to focus on something else.

That was her first mistake that day.

* * *

"Mai-chan, you look like you've been through hell and back. You okay?" Nakamura, the resident Nice Guy with perfect teeth, asked Mai after lunch.

Twenty minutes before, she'd been asked to go to the board and solve a complex math problem that she couldn't even remember what the formula for was. She'd stood up there in a thinking position for thirty seconds, chalk poised at her chin as she brainstormed, and eventually sat back down out of embarrassment. The students laughed at her, but seeing as she was well-liked within the walls of that school, Mai didn't take it too personally. Except the teacher (who basically hated Mai) called her out for her D- on her recent math test that Mai actually remembered taking and the class laughed at her again and she wanted to die (again).

"Huh? Oh, yeah, I'm fine, don't worry about it dude," Mai mumbled from in between her elbows. Her face was muffled by the wooden desk, and she could just barely see the light peeking at the edge of her eyes, beckoning her to come out of her sweater shell.

Mai pushed her head further in between her crossed arms until her forehead hit the desk. She let out a quiet groan and Nakamura chuckled good-naturedly. He was a nice boy.

'Past me would have faked being sad to have him comfort me,' Mai thought, releasing an internal sigh as she remembered how she was so obsessed with boys in her class until Shibuya frickin' Kazuya showed up and made her fall in love with him like the asshole he was and made her completely _stupid from love_ -

"Sooo, fine equates to not very good, I'm assuming?" Nakamura questioned with a slight giggle, ruffling Mai's hair. Mai shot her head up like an angry cat, sending Nakamura glare and attempting to flatten her thick (though short) mane. Forget him and his perfect smile, he was dead to her. As dead as she was a day or so ago. (...Was she even allowed to make jokes about her own suicide? It seemed crude and horrible, but it was helping her cope.)

"Now I remember why we stopped being friends in elementary school," Mai said with a frosty stare, fingers still combing through her hair, trying to rid it of the tangles that gathered when Nakamura _ruined_ it.

Nakamura blinked. "We were friends in elementary school?" He asked, with a confused tilt of the head that Mai was 100% certain had two of the girls across the room gasping for breath.

Mai thought for a minute. It _was_ Nakamura who she was friends with back then, right? Her memory of her earlier years wasn't that good.

"Well," Mai said, ignoring her previous anger, "I _think_ we were."

"Huh," Nakamura said, bringing a hand up to his chin to rub it and look thoughtful like that Albert Einstein guy he bought a coffee mug of (one of the only things Mai remembered about him, considering he brought the mug to school every single day). "Interesting."

"Yeah, interesting," Mai agreed dully.

The bell rang, and Nakamura went back to his seat after a quick goodbye. Mai stayed put in her desk and thought hard on what just happened.

 _Were we friends when we were younger. . . ?_

A flash of lightning, a boat rocking through the stormy waves of the midnight ocean. A fishing town far, far away from Shibuya. Shimmering rain dancing through the wind and onto the tongues of two girls and a boy.

There were no memories of Nakamura from her childhood. There was Ayumi, the blonde girl who loved playing princess, and Namako, the cute boy who she played mermaids and mermen with, but no-

"Taniyama-san, if you're not going to pay attention in class then I suggest you _leave_."

* * *

Two hours later, Mai had all but forgotten about her previous worries. That was _another_ mistake she made that day. In an attempt to concentrate, she had to banish the thoughts from her mind. She had to somehow dig up her memories from school and attempt to put them to use. She was going to be saving Gene soon, which meant that he and Naru would never open up a research work place in Shibuya, which also meant Mai would never get the well-paying job she had previously.

Which meant she had to try harder. Do her best. Put in 120% effort.

Become intelligent.

Find a way to balance school and work. Probably limit the time she spent hanging out with Keiko and Michiru.

Try and fix her future.

Oh, how troublesome.

* * *

"Hey, Mai, wait up!" Nakamura called out from behind Mai as she walked out of the school. Mai turned around and stood still as Nakamura ran to catch up with her. She blinked a few times to attempt to focus her good eye and bad eye on the stupid-tall classmate of hers.

"Hey!" He said after meeting up with Mai, handing the girl one of his diamond grins that had his eyes sparkling like they were golden balls of happiness. "Thanks. Anyways, I was wondering if you wanted to, um, come with me and a few others to the karaoke place on Highrise at 6:00?" Nakamura asked with the same confident grin in place. His cheeks were ever so slightly pink.

A few thoughts raced through Mai's head, the most prominent one being, _Well I certainly don't remember this happening when I went to school the first time._

The second one being, _Well, I_ do _want to, but I need to get caught up on school work._

"Uhh," Mai said, stalling. School was definitely a priority for her, most definitely, but. She was starved for human contact and Keiko and MIchiru were off doing who knows what in the shed behind the school, and really, if she was going to be in the past and attempt to fix her life, well.

Maybe one night at a karaoke place couldn't hurt.

Agreeing to go was another mistake she made that day, but Mai was full of mistakes, so what's a few more going to do?

* * *

One night at a karaoke place hurt.

Before arriving, Mai did her English and Literature homework, struggling through a few hours of recent worksheets she hadn't turned in and the pages given out that day.

It all sucked. For a while, she entertained the thought of just leaving it to do in the morning or after karaoke (which she still thought she shouldn't have agreed to go to, in the back corner of her mind where sub-conscious thoughts swim around but never completely take solid form), but in the end she decided to toughen up and complete the papers.

Then that left her a half hour to get ready for karaoke. Since she wasn't very good at putting makeup on with both eyes intact, and even worse now that one was still blurry blobs of gray and muted colors, she decided to put on facial moisturizer, lipbalm, and earrings to look kinda classy but still natural and like she tried enough for a casual karaoke night.

She put on her dark green turtleneck that went missing in her last life (thank the heavens she found it again, it was her favorite then and is her favorite now), and a dark grey skirt. She really liked skirts. After The Assault, she had a fit of mental instability where she ruined each skirt and all pairs of shorts she owned. It sucked. It hurt. Mai didn't have the money to buy new ones. So she settled for jeans.

But that was then. That was then when Mai was just barely holding onto the rope. She had no real will to live, to be honest. Dead family, lost friends, bad job, mental issues.

The list could go more into detail but Mai didn't really want to throw herself a pity party twenty five minutes before she was to go to a karaoke joint with the most attractive guy in her grade. And maybe a few of his attractive friends.

Then, after letting herself have a three minute pity party, she told herself to toughen up, slipped on her flats, and headed out of her teacher's house towards the karaoke joint.

That's where she was now. Sitting in a booth with six others, nervously drinking a cup of lemonade as she listened to Mirai's tipsy rendition of the Cowboy Bebop OST.

Nakamura was drunk. So was Mirai, and a guy Mai didn't know by name. All she was certain of was that this night was a kind of total waste of time, she wasn't having fun, and Nakamura was a touchy drunk.

Which made her uncomfortable. After putting on her gray skirt she noticed that she still had a scar from where she was stabbed. It was a white rectangle, raised on her skin and somewhat thick. Mai tended to run her finger over it a lot since she arrived at the karaoke joint. Nakamura picked up on her doing it a while after she arrived, and took to poking it and laughing drunkenly in her ear at inopportune times.

To say Mai wasn't having a good time was an understatement.

She wanted to leave.

And that led her to now.

"Um, Nakamura-kun, I'm gonna step out for a moment," She muttered and pushed his body off of her shoulder, though gently, so as not to anger him. She set her glass of lemonade down on the table and quickly walked to the door, pulling it open and shutting it behind her just a second later to the sound of a raucous Mirai finishing the theme song.

 _Well_ , Mai thought. _Even though I lied, I'm glad I'm not in there anymore. Too loud. Too alcohol-y. I should leave soon, before Nakamura notices I've been gone for too long._

As Mai mused, she didn't take notice of the sound of the door closing seconds too late. She leaned against the brick wall of the building, staring up at the sky, seeing little stars.

They never were easy to see in the city. The pollution clouded the sky, but there were still small twinkles of light that peeked out through the smog.

Drunken giggling brought her out of her trance. She turned her head to the sound, and leaning up against the wall, closer to the door, was Nakamura. He was staring at her, somewhat dreamily, somewhat stupidly drunk, and he let his glazed eyes travel down Mai's body.

She suddenly felt very, very uncomfortable. Kind of like she wanted to leave right then and there, forget Nakamura's smile and eyes and hair and toned body and leering gaze and-

She seen red in the corner of her good eye. Zooming, fast. A red lamborghini. In Mai's head, it looked like a race car and death.

The vehicle swerved violently around the corner, and Mai suddenly had a very, very bad feeling.

"Whhha? Maaai, wher' y'u goin'?" Nakamura called out into the night, but Mai was already running. She had to be sure. _It could be a different car, it could be just a random coincidence, **it wasn't even supposed to happen for another week-**_

Mai's feet skidded on the pavement as she threw her body around the edge of the corner.

She saw Gene's body hit the windshield of the red car. It tumbled into the pavement of a parking lot and the car stopped. The engine stopped running, a tall woman with bleach blonde hair stepped out, and she gasped as if she was witnessing a murder, not _being_ a murderer, and it was loud enough for Mai to hear.

Mai kept running towards them.

She found her voice and screamed. She screamed as though the weight of the world was on her shoulders, pushing, pushing her deeper and deeper underwater. Her stomach was curling in and around itself. A snake of black was twisting through her veins and seeping into her blood and-

She screamed _louder_. She screamed for the boy who guided her, for the fear of seeing someone get hit by a car. She screamed for Gene, and the idea of him. For the brother Naru lost. The thought that he could be dead right now and that _her mission was a failure,_ she _was a failure,_ **_this whole time travel thing was a waste of time_ god _she should have just died-_**

The woman backed away from Gene's body, stumbled into her car with clacking red heels, and sped away, her tires screeching in the night as she cowardly ran from the scene of the crime- and _oh, **god** ,_ Mai's heart wailed in her chest.

She ran towards Gene's body, and as she got closer and closer the blood became more and more noticeable, dark red against grey concrete.

This wasn't supposed to happen. _This wasn't supposed to happen._

* * *

 **a/n: it has been like 1+ months oops but hEy today is my birthday and i got over my writer's block for this fic so yeah ALSO IF U PMED ME ILL TRY TO GET THOSE ANSWERED BY THIS WEEKEND i'm really lazy**

 **lol at my amateur writing.**

 **see u guys soon probably**

 **ALSO: i won't be going into detail about everything mentioned in the first few chapters until later in the fic, but thank u the reviewer who told me to add more details! (smthn i have trouble with) i hope this chapter satisfies u a bit more lol**

 **anyways yea here ya go a 2.7k chapter full of filler and slight explanation and a dumb cliffhanger thing at the end**


	4. chapter four

The concept of time wasn't real to Mai at the moment, and as she sat blankly in a cold hospital waiting room chair, dripping dead-sea tears upon her short skirt, something akin to emotional apathy streamed through her veins like cold pale springwater and drained her of anything besides pressuring numbness and panic and guilt.

She almost didn't save Gene. Gene could have died on that street, drowning from the blood pooling into his lungs, and Mai would not have done anything.

Where had her resolve gone? Her determination to save Gene, no matter the costs? She was a baby; as soon as it didn't go according to plan, she messed up and couldn't do anything but cry and try to stop Gene from bleeding out.

She was pathetic. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic.

(no wonder she didn't get her eyesight back if she wasn't going to _use_ it-)

* * *

Mai chewed her nails, tasted copper, tapped her foot on the gray tiled floor, and prayed to whatever god there was that Gene would be okay.

After rushing over to him, Nakamura had sobered up- out of adrenaline or not, Mai didn't know, but she was eternally grateful, despite his too-seeing eyes and too-touchy hands- and he ran inside, alerted the people working, got them to call the police, and had someone bring out a first aid kit and towels even though they wouldn't be very useful against the wounds of a car crash. Mai was useless when it mattered most; she gripped Gene's hand and pressed one of her own against the gash on his chest, let her tears drop onto his face like salty rainwater, and tried to keep him awake by the mantra of his name.

 _Gene, Gene, Gene,_ she whispered. His eyes were closed and his breathing choppy, but they fluttered open the slightest bit when she repeated his name.

"Who are you?" He'd asked with a soft voice, mouth stained a carmine-poppy red from his gushing blood. A weak cough shook his chest, and he smiled through the pain, eyes shuttering as his body weakened and weakened and weakened in front of Mai.

"I'm sorry," Mai whispered. Her voice was choked and hoarse and wet; she felt like a hurricane had ravaged her throat and torn her vocal cords into something ripped and jagged. It hurt. She hurt.

She felt useless.

"You. . . Remind me-" a cough, wet and splattering blood onto Mai's face- "of someone," Gene gave her a small smile, his eyes closed, his cheeks rounded. He looked a bit like an angel when he did that, if you ignored the blood around his mouth and the pallor of his skin and the purple coloring his undereyes and his lips.

"I'm sorry," Mai had repeated then. A tear of hers dripped down to her chin and plopped onto Gene's mouth. It left a clear trail through the blood; Mai wished she could cleanse him of his pain.

 _I'm sorry._

"Taniyama-san," A nurse interrupted her abruptly; the image of Gene's face vanished from her mind like dissipating fog, the blood swirling up like lifted dirt and floating into the air until she couldn't see it, until Gene's face was erased permanently from her brain, and all she could remember of him was his soft blue voice, darkened red from the blood in his lungs and the pain in his chest.

"Taniyama-san," The nurse repeated, voice gentle like a spring flower. "Your friend's condition has stabilized, would you like to see him?"

Mai felt a rush of cool ocean water swirl in her chest. Relief, that's what it was. Relief.

(so why does she feel so terrified why does she feel so scared-)

"Yeah," Mai stood up on shaky legs, felt the vibrating static from her lower half falling asleep in the chair, and took a hesitant step forward towards the nurse. There was still blood on her hands, she realized. Dried and flaky and browning, like it had been there for hours upon hours without being touched. Maybe it had; Mai didn't know how much time had passed since she rode with Gene in the ambulance and watched them remove the blood from his pierced lung.

Mai's steps against the clicky tile floor were loud, and they echoed through her ears slowly. The lights of the hallway flickered from bright to dull, bright to dull, back and forth like a breathing chest, like the bright, rotating yellow beam of a lighthouse, and the changing of it irritated Mai's bad eye and left her tilting. She was already clumsy before losing half of her sight, but with the constant change, it was almost like she was walking blindfolded on numb legs without a sense of her center.

Mai took her time stepping, putting her feet down cautiously and carefully until it she could feel herself lagging behind, like she was trying to walk through water but the tide was too strong. She didn't realize the nurse had been talking to her until a gentle and manicured hand placed itself upon her shoulder, and, tightening her grip ever so softly, stopped her from continuing through the halls to Gene's room.

"Taniyama-san? Do you feel unwell?" The nurse asked. Mai heard the flowers in her voice and the waterfall flowing through it too, but the beauty did not ground her, did not keep Mai's head from sinking underwater. Did not stop Mai from beginning to lose her senses one by one until she could not see and could not walk and could not think anything besides _Gene, Gene, Gene, I'm sorry and This was all my fault, this was not supposed to happen, this was all my fault, Gene, Gene, Gene._

Mai felt flooded, and tired, and heavy like a rock, a humongous rock sinking slowly to the floor of the ocean. Felt like she was just barely drifting on the edge of consciousness, like one wrong move and she'd faint, get stuck in a hospital bed, and not be allowed to see Gene.

"Taniyama-san, I need you to respond. Do you need medical attention?"

She was sinking.

 _Gene, Gene, Gene._

 _I'm sorry._

"Taniyama-san!"

She hit the bottom of the ocean floor.

* * *

 **a/n: hi. it's been like a year and a half. sorry about that lol. at least im sixteen now! i still barely know how to write but whatever. i hope there's still a few of you interested in this story! and sorry that this chapter really sucks i've been writing it for about an hour because i wanted to get something out before i forgot about this story again. and uh.. im taking a few ap / honors classes this year so if i dont get a lot of chapters out that's why. but im going to try to stay on top of updating? i like this story idea and i want to complete it by the time i graduate high school. ive missed publishing stories. anyway.. love you guys see u next update?**

 **ok p.s. i just reread the chapter and i really wanna say im sorry it's so short and doesnt really touch on gene and is basically just mai being emo. will work on length + details + plot more! ok bye for real now.**


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